Letter signed : North Berwick, Scotland, to William Angus Knight, 1887 September 27.

Informing Knight that Professor Seth has been chosen to succeed Professor Baynes as Chair of Logic and Metaphyics at St. Andrews, on the death of the latter; discussing Ireland and Irish home rule: "I am not of a sanguine temperament, and am certainly not sanguine about the future of Ireland. But there can be no doubt whatever, in my opinion, as to what is the course we ought to pursue; and if the people of this Country can only realise the true character of the problem with which we have to deal, and have patience and persistence to deal with it, in the only spirit in which it can be dealt with successfully, I have good hope of the result; but a condition of things which is the result of causes that have been at work for hundreds of years, cannot be cured in a single session by a single Ministry"; criticizing the "Gladstonian Radicals" for the depths to which they have descended "in their anxiety to grasp every weapon by which a political opponent may be injured"; mentioning that he remains interested in writing on John Stuart Mill for Knight's series, but "[m]y chief difficulty would be that I could hardly ask his friends for materials for a Biography, as that Biography would hardly be sufficiently favorable to its subject to make it agreeable to his disciples."